Without the Mids (SSE/WE Immortal wt)

Without the Mids... (An Immortal Tale...)

Alright, the title doesn’t quite say it all. My last game not only had no stone, but I also used a friend from the past who wasn’t industrious. That’s right, our little friend Ghandi.

I had to restart about 7 times because each time I’d start off scouting & building, only to find stone SOMEWHERE nearby where I couldn’t resist the urge to rush a settler over. And while I could have chosen to just ignore it, I would feel a little too silly with stone on a SSE/WE game and not taking 100% advantage of it.

Technically, there was stone present somewhere of course this game, but the nearest location was a little too close in a neighbour’s hands. So, hopefully it will be a little entertaining, and solve some of those interesting posts I’ve seen on the forums lately. Namely how SE sucks without the Mids… SEE/WE doesn’t work without stone/industrious… and all the other comments you’ll find in the CE vs SE debate threads. I’ll just let the evidence stand for itself.

In any case, you’ll see a lot of things you saw from me before… and a few things you haven’t. I’ll post the sections in small gaps over next week to make it easy on me. But in the meantime, (and I’ll try not to give away surprise endings), I’ll leak out this small peek-preview for now::



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I like how the cavalry is running away from the blast.

You can construct watermills on non FP riverside desert tiles? Hm. Can you workshop normal desert tiles? Weird.

e: The map gen REALLY messed up here. Monty has desert tiles in his capita--- oh, Global Warming! A LOT of nukes were fired.

Prediction:

I read some of your previous threads but after a few they all seemed quite the same so I didn't look at most of them. (no offense btw) But I'm curious about this one.

I usually play sse as well, but with phi leader and running scientists so I do less wonder hogging. I'll be looking forward to how you'll pull this off without mids, if I miss mids I switch to sse/ce.

Consider me a lurker on this.

Cool, variation. Your map generator must really you if you need to regenerate to not get stone. It's funny how people have different experiences with same game, i don't think stone is being handed to me that constantly.

BurN said:

I read some of your previous threads but after a few they all seemed quite the same so I didn't look at most of them. (no offense btw)

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And because of this it might be good if you start focusing on specific details of your decision making. Currently we gain insight into why you found cities where you do, but never have a clue what those cities do for the entire game. We are very informed of when your civilization reaches 2, 5, 10, and 20 million souls, but not as informed of how you are so able to bribe leaders to fight each other. We repeatedly read about how stupid the AI is, but never read about how you adapt your long term strategy to meet the realities of each game.

Originally I thought you were just providing proof that your playstyle was as effective as your claimed it, and thus weren't trying to educate other players, but after 10 games or so, I think your educational efforts still leave a lot for players to guess about.

Lord Chambers said:

And because of this it might be good if you start focusing on specific details of your decision making. Currently we gain insight into why you found cities where you do, but never have a clue what those cities do for the entire game. We are very informed of when your civilization reaches 2, 5, 10, and 20 million souls, but not as informed of how you are so able to bribe leaders to fight each other. We repeatedly read about how stupid the AI is, but never read about how you adapt your long term strategy to meet the realities of each game.

Originally I thought you were just providing proof that your playstyle was as effective as your claimed it, and thus weren't trying to educate other players, but after 10 games or so, I think your educational efforts still leave a lot for players to guess about.

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I too would like to see some detail on your non-capital cities to see what they can provide for you in a game. I mean if your capital is running all the specialists, I don't know if you are also running specialists in other cities....I think you are though because you said "no cottages" but I might be wrong. Perhaps an idea of when they were founded, what their primary duties are, etc.

Help the ignorant out here.

Mids?

Are we referring to the Pyramids here? That's all I can think of, but I cant think of a reason why someone would find typing "Pyra" too difficult or not worth the effort.

Or is this some sort of acronym I'm unaware of?

Mids is the standard acronym for pyramids.

hehe you refer to the Pyramids as "'mids" and not by "Pyra" b/c mids sounds better

(double post, deleted)

Nice too see you can do this with the Indian civilization.

My Immortal (sse/se) w/ the English that I wanted to post a write-up on isn't going too great - simply cause I mass cottaged, had mostly costal cities, and even with a huge tech lead ( +1800 /turn around 1600AD) my lackluster production crippled me.

Playing again with Ramesses, trying out a 'no cottage' policy, building the A. Wat, and having mostly priest specialists is making a hell of a difference and production is good. If I do an immortal write-up (like I said I was going to) I might do it with my this game, but then theres not much point cause it's very similar too your WTs.

At any rate, I'm starting a Deity game with Ramesses, and if I can pull it off then I'll make a WT for sure on it.

Its reassuring to see that you can still win on Immortal using a SSE/WE without an industrious Civ, stone, or the Mids. Good job.

our little friend Ghandi

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Its reassuring to see that you can still win on Immortal using a SSE/WE without an industrious Civ, stone, or the Mids. Good job

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obsolete,

Is it the Spiritual or Philisophical trait that brings you back now and then to Ghandi? I'm thinking the combination of the two has great synergy, combined with Mysticism/Mining out of the gate, when you choose not to go with an Industrious leader.

Regardless of the critics, there's no doubt in my mind that you can do this very successfully without Ramses. And I ask because, while your walkthroughs are certainly interesting, your running commentary contains a number of insights that I can pick up on and make up for my lack of experience for cultural victories on Deity.

I like how the cavalry is running away from the blast.

You can construct watermills on non FP riverside desert tiles? Hm. Can you workshop normal desert tiles? Weird.

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That poor cavalry didn’t have chance Stick around and you’ll see what happens when a 4-ICBM volley impacts on a city in one wave. And what happens to anything next to that city

As for the watermills on riverside desert, hell, you can even put watermills on ice too. I don’t know if that is a bug, but I sure hope that they don’t FIX that feature if it is!

Originally I thought you were just providing proof that your playstyle was as effective as your claimed it, and thus weren't trying to educate other players, but after 10 games or so, I think your educational efforts still leave a lot for players to guess about.

Click to expand...

I”ll try to break this one into more smaller sections, and go about posting things slowly. A little more images maybe, write-up, etc.

Playing again with Ramesses, trying out a 'no cottage' policy, building the A. Wat, and having mostly priest specialists is making a hell of a difference and production is good. If I do an immortal write-up (like I said I was going to) I might do it with my this game, but then theres not much point cause it's very similar too your WTs.

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There is bound to be some differences. At least you may show things that I have a habbit of skipping over.

Is it the Spiritual or Philisophical trait that brings you back now and then to Ghandi? I'm thinking the combination of the two has great synergy, combined with Mysticism/Mining out of the gate, when you choose not to go with an Industrious leader.

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Yes, I like the combo of the two traits, but I’m not sure I can pick out a specific item of Ghandi that makes me want him. It’s everything put together like the mining as well that you pointed out. The UU isn’t bad either. The one thing I’m not too sure about is his mysticism starting tech. It has its goods and bads. But on deity, it seems to not be very useful, so ends up being wasted there.

Without the Mids

Leader:: Ghandi
Speed:: Normal
Difficulty:: Immortal


Disclaimer:
Blah… blah… blah… for experts only, blah, blah, blah.




Some Past Walkthroughs indexed here::

Beyond the Sword

• SSE/WE with a Pack of Wolves (Ramesses)
• The Great Lighthouse (Ramesses)
• Competing vs Darius I (Ramesses)
• The Insane Walkthrough (Ramesses)
• The Insane Walkthrough (Ghandi)
• The Insane Walkthrough (HC)

WarLords

• The Insane Walkthrough (Ramesses)
• The Unreal Walkthrough (Ramesses)
• The Unreal Walkthrough (Part II Ghandi)
• The Impossible Walkthrough (Ramesses)
• The Impossible Walkthrough (Part II Ghandi)

Part I -- The Ancient Era


4000 BC

I don’t quite like this spot, as many of you probably know by now. I really hate ocean sides, though we’ll see what we can make out of it by the later stages of the game.

At least we start on a hills/plains, but that corn really isn’t useful to us with our starting techs, and we don’t even know fishing, so that single fish source in the sea won’t be helping us either. Ughh… Ramesses would have been a better choice here, and we don’t even have many trees around to make good use of either.

Oh well, like I said, we’ll just have to stick with it, and try to do our best here.

3720 BC
We popped bronzeworking. I’m actually not pleased about this, as we were already researching it ourselves. If only I could learn to wait on poping huts before I finish researching a tech, then I won’t have to run into these cases of constantly poping techs that I’m just about completed myself! Ugh, what a waste. Though the last time I tried to do this, some dumb-scout from some other civ zoomed right in and stole my hut on me! Seems I just can’t ever do any right in this regard.
-ni


3480 BC
Met Roosevelt, he’s probably close.
-ni

3320 BC
Met Hatshepsut. Now we got 2 leaders who will try to beat me to wonders. This may make things a little tense during races, but we won’t have to worry about military too much at least.
-ni

2720 BC
The Great Wall is ready for completion. Whatever few trees were left, are now gone. Also, our little warrior got pounced on. We did our best; tried to keep him on good defensive terrain, but sometimes you just get screwed by the RNG in this game.

Note: 5 Turns left till priest-hood, which allows us a good shot at the Oracle.
Also, no stone has been found, and if it’s avail, we’ll probably find it too late. But it almost doesn’t matter anymore, as we just do not have the production capacity in this spot to guarantee a claim to the mids. I think it’s best to skip it, and focus on expansion and other (cheaper) wonders instead.

2520
A rich source of Tin has been discovered in the hills!
+2h

Note: Unfortunately, our fast-worker is out of a job. We don’t have the tech for agriculture, so he can’t work the plot. He also doesn’t start off with roads, so he can’t do a damn thing. Again, we started with a bad spot, not much trees, and nothing really for our worker to do here. Only 2 hills present, which are already mined. So as much as it pains me, we are going to park him here, and have him fortify on the plot for now.

If only we had Ramesses! (or a better start location).

1920 BC
Oracle is up & running, so we get to choose a free tech. There are a lot of good and crap choices on this list, and while a lot of semi-pro players would want to take monarchy for the properties it unlocks, and a lot of newbs would like to take CoL for the religion, we are going to take Aesthetics here.

Now normally I take mathematics, but here that one doesn’t help. We are tree poor, and have no stone for the HG. So even the 50% chop bonus is laughable here. However, Aethestics allows us to slingshot right into the Classical Era. It means we can work on other things, and still have a shot at stuff like the great library, as the AI will have to tech to it, which will take a small delay.

Though to add even more weight to this, I did recently spot a location in the north that had a marble patch. So this, in combination with Aethestics makes the most sense. The only bad part is I’ll have to put a city there to get it hooked up, and the food resource for where I want to put the city is… well…… it just doesn’t exist. But I’m going to put a ‘junker’ city there anyhow, right ontop of that source to get as much benefit from it as I can, and hopefully it’ll see a return on it down the road in the future.

Note: StoneHenge has just been completed in a far away land. Yeah, that sucks we didn’t get it but we had some bad luck with my warrior, and being tree-density poor I couldn’t really chop the henge, unless I wanted to lose the shot for the oracle. If only I had my warrior, I could chop outside my culture without worrying about getting pounced on again. But what can you do…. Just improvise the best you can.




And so…. Ends part I, the Ancient Era.

Sounds pretty hard so far, as us pyramid/industrious or stone naysayers would expect. If you weren't afraid of losing the great wall, it might have been better to save the plains forest.

So your research is crap, pyramids is impossible without the warlords engineer, my bets are on whipping a library and running scientists or relying on a second city for wonders. If you sacrificed your principles, you could probably double your tech by cottaging your marble city.

I have to say, that is one ugly fat cross. 10 water tiles including 4 ocean tiles... geez. At least that long winding river will enable you do build a Levee.